SUNDAY, JULY 23, 2017
.
IN COLLABORATION WITH
ABCDE NATIONAL WEEKLY
IVANKA INC. Her clothing line’s practices collide with some of the principles she has championed. PAGE 12
Politics Trump, GOP’s failing health bill 4 World Escalating power struggle in Iran 10 5 Myths Florida 23
SUNDAY, JULY 23, 2017
2
If you’re hosting visitors this year, you’re gonna need a Guide. 2017 Wenatchee Valley
FREE
Visitor Guide Featuring ◆ Wenatchee Valley ◆ Lake Chelan ◆ Leavenworth ◆ The Methow ◆ The Okanogan ◆ Columbia Basin
Here’s the one guide to everything in North Central Washington, it’s the 2017 Spring/Summer edition of the Wenatchee Valley Visitor’s Guide. It’s 100 pages of great ideas for things to see, do and experience throughout the region – it’s almost overwhelming. Featuring stunning photography, the entire lineup of events throughout the spring and summer seasons, maps and much more. Or pick up a virtual copy – the entire guide is available in a digital format on our website. Just click on wenatcheeworld.com/vg/2017/ and discover the many activities in this region via your computer or smartphone.
Pick up a free copy at the Wenatchee World and at locations throughout North Central Washington. Or read a digital edition of our visitor’s guide online at wenatcheeworld.com/vg/2017/
SUNDAY, JULY 23, 2017
3
KLMNO WEEKLY
THE FIX
6 months, 7 issues BY
A MBER P HILLIPS
P
resident Trump recently marked 181 days in office, a.k.a. 4,344 hours, a.k.a. 260,640 minutes, a.k.a. six months. So how has he spent these six months? Here’s a rundown, in seven issues that were central to his campaign.
3
FEDERAL GOVERNMENT The promise: Make it work more efficiently. The reality: The federal government workforce of 2.1 million people has become a target for Trump and his allies to “drain the swamp,” blunting morale for many of these workers.
1
HEALTH CARE The promise: Repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act. The reality: A fractious Republican Party hasn’t done either, and Trump has seemed mostly uninterested in trying to help them find a way to come together on it. Watch for: Whether Trump (and Republicans) give up trying to repeal Obamacare and work with Democrats to tweak it.
2
IMMIGRATION The promise: Build a border wall. The reality: He still really wants to build that wall. Trump hasn’t been one to delve into policy details, but he’s uncharacteristically engaged on the finer details of the wall, but Trump hasn’t figured out how to make Mexico pay for it, which means Congress would reluctantly have to. Watch for: Whether Trump demands funding for a wall as Congress funds the government by Oct. 1, which could lead to a government shutdown.
2B
THE TRAVEL BAN The promise: Temporarily ban Muslims or people from terrorism-prone countries from coming to the United States. The reality: His travel ban is half on pause while a federal court decides whether it’s constitutional.
KLMNO WEEKLY
Such issues as health care, immigration and Russia were central to Trump’s campaign.
Also interesting: A Washington Post-ABC News poll found that about half of Americans believe in the concept of a deep state — i.e. “military, intelligence and government officials who try to secretly manipulate government policy.” No evidence of this exists. Watch for: Whether Trump nominates people to lead a historically understaffed federal government or leaves much of it vacant.
4
CHINA The promise: Stop China from taking advantage of the United States. The reality: International relations experts argued that when Trump left the Paris climate agreement, it empowered China, the world’s other largest greenhouse gas emitter, to cozy up to Europe. Trump also suddenly decided China is not a currency manipulator.
This publication was prepared by editors at The Washington Post for printing and distribution by our partner publications across the country. All articles and columns have previously appeared in The Post or on washingtonpost.com and have been edited to fit this format. For questions or comments regarding content, please e-mail weekly@washpost.com. If you have a question about printing quality, wish to subscribe, or would like to place a hold on delivery, please contact your local newspaper’s circulation department. © 2017 The Washington Post / Year 3, No. 41
Watch for: China and the United States’ so-so relationship to deteriorate.
5
RUSSIA The promise: To get along with Russia better than President Barack Obama did. The reality: Trump may be getting along with Russia at the expense of his perception by Americans. We learned last week that he had a previously undisclosed one-on-one meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin at the Group of 20 summit. Watch for: Only special counsel Robert S. Mueller III and his growing team of lawyers can answer what happened. They’re investigating potential collusion, financial crimes and whether the president obstructed justice.
6
CONGRESS The promise: To make it work. The reality: Trump does not have a good relationship with Congress. He works under chaos; Congress has a hard time functioning in chaos. He prefers to threaten lawmakers; Congress prefers to be cajoled. He’s not interested in details; Congress must have details. The differences have manifested themselves in Republicans’ inability to pass major legislation, even though their party controls Washington. Watch for: Privately, Republicans are fed up with Trump’s penchant for controversy. So is it a matter of when, not if, some of them start ditching him publicly?
7
WINNING The promise: “We’ll win so much, you’re going to get tired of winning” The reality: This one’s in the eye of the beholder. n
©The Washington Post
CONTENTS POLITICS THE NATION THE WORLD COVER STORY ECONOMY BOOKS OPINION FIVE MYTHS
4 8 10 12 17 18 20 23
ON THE COVER Ivanka Trump, who now works full time in the White House, still owns her company and has the power to veto new deals. Photograph by MARKUS SCHREIBER, Associated Press
SUNDAY, JULY 23, 2017
4
KLMNO WEEKLY
POLITICS
The GOP’s path to health-care failure BY R OBERT C OSTA, K ELSEY S NELL AND S EAN S ULLIVAN
V
ice President Pence arrived at the National Governors Association summer meeting with one mission: to revive support for the flagging Republican plan to rewrite the nation’s health-care laws. He failed. Instead of rousing cheers on the waterfront in Providence, R.I., Pence was greeted with an icy air of skepticism a week ago Friday as he pitched the legislation, which would reduce federal Medicaid funding and phase out coverage in dozens of states. By last Monday evening, when President Trump and Pence gathered a cluster of GOP senators in the Blue Room of the White House over plates of lemon ricotta agnolotti and grilled rib-eye steak, the measure was all but dead. “The president talked about France and Bastille Day,” Sen. Steve Daines (R-Mont.) said in an interview Tuesday, recalling the president’s tales during dinner of parades and pomp from his recent trip to Paris. Daines described the group’s conversation, which also touched on issues ranging from health care to the debt limit, as loose — as if Trump “sat down and went out to dinner with friends, acquaintances, people you work with. It was just dinner to talk about what’s going on.” As the dinner ended, reality returned. Two more Republican senators had suddenly bolted from supporting the health-care bill, lifting the total number of Republicans opposed to four and effectively killing it. “I was very surprised when the two folks came out last night,” Trump told reporters last Tuesday. “We thought they were in fairly good shape.” Yet the dramatic collapse of the GOP proposal in the Senate was hardly a shock to most, especially those intimately involved in a venture that has been stalled and fitful since the House passed its version in May.
JABIN BOTSFORD/THE WASHINGTON POST
How Trump, Pence and Senate leaders fumbled their latest chance The upheaval last Monday was a tipping point after weeks of burbling discontent within the party about whether passing the legislation made sense. Nearly every GOP senator was eager to check the box of repealing and replacing the Affordable Care Act they had long opposed — but many were also distressed by the possible costs of upending a law that has grown deep roots in states, risen in popularity and is relied upon by some Republican governors. Moderates were always skittish about the drastic Medicaid cuts opposed by many of their governors. Conservatives were always unhappy with the scope of the Senate’s legislation, which they felt did not go far enough to
gut the law. And Trump was frequently disengaged, sporadically tweeting and making calls to on-the-fence senators but otherwise avoiding selling the bill at the kind of big rallies that he often holds on issues he champions. “It has been obvious to me for some time, and likely obvious to the leaders, that up to 10 Republicans were uncomfortable with the bill and were thinking about voting against the motion to proceed,” Sen. Susan Collins (RMaine), a critic of the bill, said in an interview last week. “So it’s surprising to me that after the administration failed to win over the governors this past weekend, there wasn’t more of a recogni-
The day darkens at the White House, where the president hosted a group of Republican senators for dinner last week. The upheaval that night was a tipping point in the Senate after weeks of burbling discontent within the GOP about whether passing its health-care proposal made sense.
tion of the fact that the bill was probably in fatal trouble.” Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), who has long cultivated a reputation as a canny operator, found it nearly impossible to wrangle together his conference amid the mounting concerns. He could offer them tweaks and adjustments but not the political cover that they coveted. Neither could the White House, which kept tabs on GOP senators but did not drive the negotiations at all. “None of us knew what the meeting was about last night. We just were invited to the White House,” Daines said. “There was no topic given to us.” Still, a false sense of confidence
SUNDAY, JULY 23, 2017
5
POLITICS from the White House and Senate GOP leadership came to define the entire process. Each day seemed to bring a wave of new assertions that Senate Republicans were committed to fulfilling what has been the party’s signature pledge for nearly a decade — and then there would be new twists that threatened that ambition. With Trump engulfed in the fallout from investigations of Russian interference in the 2016 campaign, Pence became the Trump administration’s main advocate for the legislation. He went to Senate lunch after Senate lunch, and eventually to the governors’ meeting. But Pence, like the bill, never caught on. While Pence has clout with conservatives nationally, he drew blank stares from those in front of him in Rhode Island — despite being a former Indiana governor. When he targeted Ohio Gov. John Kasich (R), who opposed the bill, he sparked outrage for appearing to incorrectly link waiting times for disabled people in Ohio to the expansion of Medicaid. Kasich was newly furious about the hardball tactics. Other influential GOP critics of the bill, such as Nevada Gov. Brian Sandoval, also would not budge, in turn keeping Sen. Dean Heller (R-Nev.) almost certainly in the “no” camp. “This is a dramatic change to what most of us have reacted to within the last four years,” Sandoval told reporters over the weekend. He likened the healthcare push to shaking an Etch-aSketch. Connecticut Gov. Dan Malloy (D), who attended the governors’ conference, summed up the Democratic view in an interview last Tuesday: “If he’s treating a Republican governor in Ohio that way, how would he treat me?” Malloy singled out a private breakfast session last weekend, in which administration officials sought to win over governors on the Senate legislation, as particularly problematic for the White House’s sale. He said one official sought to discredit the Congressional Budget Office; less than a minute later, another official cited a CBO statistic to defend his argument. “It was heavy handed. It was ham-handed,” Malloy said of the administration’s approach at the summit.
MELINA MARA/THE WASHINGTON POST
The CBO had been set to release another report as soon as Monday on what the bill would do to insurance coverage levels, premium costs and the federal budget deficit. But it ended up not being released. A CBO report on an earlier version of the legislation projected that it would result in 22 million fewer Americans with insurance by 2026 than under current law. Delays in the past week gave opponents of the bill more time to protest, over the July 4 recess and again this week because of Sen. John McCain’s (R-Ariz.) surgery. Inside the West Wing, Pence and Trump advisers continued to operate as if passage was possible, regardless of the unsuccessful turn in Providence. When the dinner convened Monday, Pence was scheduled to dine at his residence later that week with undecided Republicans. Regardless of the negative feedback, the White House believed that the NGA meetings went as well as they could have expected considering that the governors were expected to be clamoring for more federal money than the bill would provide. Pence and Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price — both former House members — teamed up on the call list, wooing last week by phone. Among the members who were being monitored closely by Pence
was Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah), according to a person familiar with the negotiations. In multiple discussions with Pence, Lee indicated that he had reservations but was not a firm “no” and was open to further talks. But it was Lee and Sen. Jerry Moran (R-Kan.) who ended up announcing their opposition on Monday night as Pence and Trump dined with other lawmakers at the White House — a final, vivid reminder of how the rosy view among many senior Republicans rarely, if ever, tracked with the actual state of play. Lee and Moran made it four Republican “no” votes. They joined Sen. Rand Paul (Ky.) and Collins, who had declared their opposition days earlier. With a 52-seat majority, Republicans could afford to lose only two votes to pass the bill since all 46 Democrats and two independents were expected to vote against the proposal, with Pence as the potential tiebreaker. One sign that the White House and McConnell didn’t see it coming: the senators who were in the Blue Room on Monday night. They were not holdouts but mostly heavyweights of the Republican leadership: Sens. John Cornyn (Tex.), Lamar Alexander (Tenn.), and Roy Blunt (Mo.), among others. Trump, impatient with the Senate’s glacial pace, asked for a
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) found it nearly impossible to wrangle together his conference for the health bill. He could offer them tweaks and adjustments but not the political cover that they coveted.
“It’s surprising to me that . . . there wasn’t more of a recognition of the fact that the bill was probably in fatal trouble.” Sen. Susan Collins (RMaine)
KLMNO WEEKLY
candid assessment of the legislation’s status from the veteran lawmakers, according to officials familiar with the meeting. He implored them to hurry up and get the bill to his desk. But it was Paris and the flag-waving festivities he had witnessed alongside French President Emmanuel Macron recently that occupied much of his attention during the conversation, the officials said. As difficult as the health-care debate had been, there was a pervasive feeling that McConnell would somehow prevail. “I wouldn’t put it on him,” Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) said last Tuesday about Trump. “The bottom line is there are members here who understood the president’s preference and were willing to vote against it anyways.” Some Senate Republicans said McConnell’s strategy of working an inside game and largely leaving Trump to observer-cheerleader status was misguided from the start. Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) said the public should have been far more informed about the bill. “We didn’t have the courage to lay out exactly what caused premiums to increase,” Johnson said. “We don’t even have the [CBO] score on this latest version. It’s an insane process. If you don’t have information how can you even have a legitimate discussion and debate?” Last Tuesday brought more tension. There was finger-pointing and faction-forming as Pence and White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus worked to repair relationships with senators, many of whom saw the president and his team as perhaps well-intentioned but fumbling in their understanding of Congress. During a Senate lunch, when McConnell broached voting last Wednesday on a bill that would simply repeal Obamacare, he was met with resistance, according to aides familiar with the meeting. McConnell had speakers lined up to support his plan, but a number of senators, fuming over the Monday drama and other issues, asked for a pause rather than quick legislative action. After the lunch, McConnell did not say when a health-care vote would happen, other than the “near future.” By the end of the day, he said it would happen “early next week.” n © The Washington Post
SUNDAY, JULY 23, 2017
6
KLMNO WEEKLY
NATION
Is reviving opioid addicts worth cost? BY T IM C RAIG AND N ICOLE L EWIS
Middletown, Ohio
T
he coroner here in the outer suburbs of Cincinnati gets the call almost every day. Man “slumped over the dining room table.” Woman “found in the garage.” Man “found face down on the kitchen floor of his sister’s residence.” Man “on his bedroom floor — there was a syringe beneath the body.” Coroner Lisa K. Mannix chronicles them all in autopsy reports. With 96 fatal overdoses in just the first four months of this year, Mannix said the opioid epidemic ravaging western Ohio and scores of other communities along the Appalachian Mountains and the rivers that flow from it continues to worsen. Hospitals are overwhelmed with overdoses, smalltown morgues are running out of space for the bodies, and local officials from Kentucky to Maine are struggling to pay for attempting to revive, rehabilitate or bury the victims. As their budgets strain, communities have begun questioning how much money and effort they should be spending to deal with overdoses, especially in cases involving people who have taken near-fatal overdoses multiple times. State and local officials say it might be time for “tough love”: pushing soaring medical costs onto drug abusers or even limiting how many times first responders can save an individual’s life. “It’s not that I don’t want to treat overdose victims, it’s that the city cannot afford to treat overdose victims,” said Middletown Council Member Daniel Picard, noting this industrial town in northern Butler County might have to raise taxes in response to the crisis. The debate comes as demand for opioid antidote medication surges, creating new challenges for police and emergency crews already emotionally drained as they watch their communities — and, in some cases, families — torn apart by opioid addiction.
TY WRIGHT/THE WASHINGTON POST
As drug overdoses exact a higher price, communities ponder who should be saved Often, the only thing separating whether an overdose victim goes to the hospital instead of the morgue is a dose of naloxone, also known by the brand name Narcan, a medication that can reverse the effects of opioid overdoses. Two doses of an injectable form of naloxone, Evzio, cost $4,500, up from $690 in 2014. The price of other forms of the drug, including the nasally administered Narcan, typically range from $70 to $150 per dose, officials say. Compounding the costs, the potency of the newest batches of opioids often means first responders must administer multiple doses of naloxone to revive patients. Health officials say powerful additives to the illicit market — such as fentanyl and carfentanil, an elephant tranquilizer — are to blame. Even if saved, an opioid user often is back on drugs within days, if not hours, officials say. Here in Ohio, first responders say it’s not uncommon for overdose victims to have previously been
revived with naloxone at least a half-dozen times. Some officials and residents are starting to ask how a community can bear to try to help those who do not appear to want to help themselves. The debate has shades of the divisive policy debates about drug treatment and tough jail sentences during urban America’s crack epidemic in the late 1980s and 1990s. But in the suburban and rural communities that largely escaped that epidemic, the debate this time is far more intimate, as residents’ traditional views about law and order — and how to spend limited resources — are being tested by a growing number of addicts. “You got half the population, probably more, who have been affected by this, and they understand and get it, that this is a disease,” said Scott Gehring, head of Butler County’s Community Health Alliance. “And then you have the other side, and it’s very easy for them to say these people are just a burden.”
Butler County Sheriff Richard K. Jones decided not to let his deputies carry naloxone, a lifesaving medicine for those suffering opioid overdoses, because his officers are not paramedics.
In Maine, Gov. Paul LePage (R) has pushed to make overdose survivors pay for their Narcan. LePage also vetoed a bill to expand access to the medicine, but the legislature voted to override him. In towns across Ohio, similar debates are emerging as legislators ponder both the fiscal and emotional costs of an opioid epidemic that killed nearly 4,000 people in the state in the last year, according to the Ohio’s Health Department. Though figures for 2017 are preliminary, many Ohio officials anticipate this year’s toll will be even higher. Larry Mulligan Jr., mayor of Middletown, said the city has spent $100,000 on Narcan in the first six months of the year, a tenfold increase from what the town spent during all of last year. Paramedics in Middletown have responded to nearly 600 overdose calls in 2017, already eclipsing the 2016 total, according to city officials. Picard, the council member, has proposed a controversial three-strikes policy in which first responders wouldn’t administer Narcan to repeated overdose victims. In 2016, Ohio EMS units administered at least 19,570 doses of Naloxone, according to state records covering the first nine months of the year. “First responders are reaching a new level of frustration responding to multiple calls, for repeated victims, and they just don’t feel like they are making progress,” Mulligan said. “We can’t just keep reviving people. We have to address solutions.” In Maryland, concerns about funding also have forced the Baltimore Department of Health to ration its dwindling naloxone supplies, providing kits to areas where the need is greatest. With the help of an algorithm, Leana Wen, Baltimore’s health commissioner, makes decisions about where to supply naloxone kits, prioritizing needle exchanges because addicts who inject drugs are at a high risk of overdosing. More funding is starting to trickle in from Maryland and
SUNDAY, JULY 23, 2017
7
NATION
charitable groups, but Wen cautions that current funding models are not sustainable because of the scope of the epidemic. “If this was any other illness, we would never accept rationing of an antidote,” she said. Congress last year approved a bill to provide $1.1 billion to help address the opioid crisis, and local officials hope that even more federal funding is coming. Several pharmaceutical companies who manufacture naloxone are providing the drugs free or at a discount to first responders and state health departments. In Kentucky, officials pay for naloxone with a mix of federal funding and settlement money from a tobacco lawsuit. Officials say they have enough naloxone to go around, for now. “I wouldn’t say we are doing great, but we are treading water — we are holding our own,” said Van Ingram, executive director for Kentucky’s Office of Drug Control Policy, a state that saw 1,404 overdose deaths last year. The cost of naloxone often isn’t the only issue in dealing with overdoses. In recent weeks, Butler
Above, Twila Fair, center, a recovering heroin addict in Troy, Ohio, talks with members of a Quick Response Team, which meets people struggling with addiction. Left, Kelly Bruner, 30, stands in the parking lot of the Miami County Recovery Center in Ohio.
County Sheriff Richard K. Jones has drawn national attention for vowing that his deputies will never carry Narcan because he doesn’t want them playing the role of paramedic. But Jones says his views also symbolize the community’s transition from frustration to desperation. People in the nation’s heartland, Jones said, are fed up with “enabling these people” amid a surge in drug-related foster care cases, property crimes
and emergency room visits. “I’ve had three babies born in my jail in 18 months, and the last one was born in the toilet,” said Jones, noting that the female population in the Butler County jail more than doubled in recent years because of drug-related offenses. “The judges, to save the babies, sentence the mothers to jail. But when the women get here, they induce labor so they can get back out and do more
“We can’t just keep reviving people. We have to address solutions.” Larry Mulligan Jr., mayor of Middletown, Ohio
KLMNO WEEKLY
heroin.” Butler County’s chief prosecutor, Michael T. Gmoser, gets angry when he hears about community opposition to naloxone. He worries that such views are undercutting southwestern Ohio’s reputation for decency and civility. “What the hell business do we have saying, ‘You don’t get Narcan to treat your sickness; we are going to let you die’?” Gmoser said, pounding his fist on his desk. “I don’t care how many times that sick person comes back asking for another shot of Narcan.” The sheriff’s stance also puts him at odds with the broader law-enforcement community. According to the Bureau of Justice Assistance, 38 states have implemented naloxone programs for police officers. “It’s not just the opioid users themselves that we are protecting,” said Keith Cain, the sheriff in Daviess County, Ky., and the chairman of bureau’s Drug Enforcement Committee. “What about the child who gets into mommy’s or daddy’s stash?” Instead of rebelling against Narcan, drug policy advocates say local officials should focus on getting more users into treatment. Not far from Butler County, in Miami County near Dayton, officials are doing just that. But in the city of Troy, the county seat and home to 25,000 residents, a paramedic, a police officer and an addictions counselor hit the streets every Wednesday to follow-up with those who they’ve previously saved. After approaching a woman slumped over a picnic table in a city park last week, the counselor spoke with Kelly Bruner, 30, about her options. Bruner agreed to be transported to a rehabilitation center. Bruner said in an interview she has overdosed on heroin 13 times in the past year, and she has been revived with Narcan 10 times. Bruner said she and her friends have now started doing “CPR on each other,” after hearing of Picard’s three-strikes proposal in nearby Middletown. “As long we know you have a pulse and a heartbeat, we aren’t going to call the cops, because no one wants to use that Narcan,” Bruner said. “Because if we can only get Narcan three times, that means there are only two more left before we die.” ©The Washington Post
SUNDAY, JULY 23, 2017
8
KLMNO WEEKLY
NATION
Firms relocate from suburbs to cities J ONATHAN O ’ C ONNELL Oak Brook, Ill. BY
V
isitors to the McDonald’s wooded corporate campus enter on a driveway named for the late chief executive Ray Kroc, then turn onto Ronald Lane before reaching Hamburger University, where more than 80,000 people have been trained as fast-food managers. Surrounded by quiet neighborhoods and easy highway connections, this 86-acre suburban compound was for four decades considered the ideal place to attract top executives as the company rose to global dominance. Now its leafy environs are considered a liability. Locked in a battle with companies of all stripes to woo top tech workers and young professionals, McDonald’s executives announced last year that they were putting the property up for sale and moving to the West Loop of Chicago. In Chicago, McDonald’s will join a slew of other companies — among them food giant Kraft Heinz, farming supplier ADM and telecommunications firm Motorola Solutions — all looking to appeal to and be near young professionals versed in the world of e-commerce, software analytics, digital engineering, marketing and finance. Such relocations are happening across the country as economic opportunities shift to a handful of top cities and jobs become harder to find in some suburbs and smaller cities. Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel (D) said the old model where executives chose locations near where they wanted to live has been upturned by the growing influence of technology in nearly every industry. Years ago, IT operations were an afterthought. Now, people with such expertise are driving top-level corporate decisions, and many of them prefer urban locales. “It used to be the IT division was in a back office somewhere,” Emanuel said. “The IT division and software, computer and data
PHOTOS BY LEE POWELL/THE WASHINGTON POST
McDonald’s and others seek to be near young professionals, leaving small towns scrambling mining, et cetera, is now next to the CEO. Otherwise, that company is gone.” The migration to urban centers threatens the prosperity outlying suburbs have long enjoyed, bringing a dose of pain felt by rural communities and exacerbating stark gaps in earnings and wealth that Donald Trump capitalized on in winning the presidency. McDonald’s may not even be the most noteworthy corporate mover in Illinois. Machinery giant Caterpillar said this year that it was moving its headquarters from Peoria to Deerfield, which is closer to Chicago. It said it would keep about 12,000 manufacturing, engineering and research jobs in its original home town. But top-paying office jobs — the type that Caterpillar’s higher-ups enjoy — are being lost, and the company is canceling plans for a 3,200-person headquarters aimed at revitalizing Peoria’s downtown.
Long term, the corporate moves threaten an orbit of smaller enterprises that fed on their proximity to the big companies, from restaurants and janitorial operations to subcontractors who located nearby. When McDonald’s arrived in Oak Brook, in 1971, many Americans were migrating in the opposite direction, away from the city. In the years since, the tiny village’s identity became closely linked with the fast-food chain as McDonald’s forged a brand that spread across postwar suburbia one Happy Meal at a time. McDonald’s, though, came under pressure to update its offerings for the Internet age, so it opened an office in San Francisco and a year later moved additional digital operations to downtown Chicago, strategically near tech incubators as well as digital outposts of companies that included Yelp and eBay. Chief executive Steve Easterbrook, who took over in spring
Above, Galen Faidley of Caterpillar uses a pair of glasses that give him a virtualreality view inside a bulldozer at the company’s technical center in Mossville, Ill.
Rennie Atterbury is a former Caterpillar executive. “The people who built this company from 1925 on . . . weren’t city people,” he said.
2015, sought to keep innovating, launching mobile ordering, emphasizing self-serve kiosks in restaurants and expanding delivery through a partnership with UberEats. The site of the new headquarters, being built in place of the studio where Oprah Winfrey’s show was filmed, is in Fulton Market, a bustling neighborhood filled with new apartments and some of the city’s most highly rated new restaurants. Chicago’s arrival as a magnet for corporations belies statistics that would normally give corporate movers pause. High homicide rates and concerns about the police department have eroded Emanuel’s popularity locally, but those issues seem confined to other parts of the city as young professionals crowd into the Loop, Chicago’s lively central business district. Chicago has been ranked the No. 1 city in the United States for corporate investment for the past four years by Site Selection Magazine, a real estate trade publication. To Peorians, Caterpillar’s change of heart came suddenly. “We’re here in Peoria to stay,” Caterpillar’s then-chief executive Doug Oberhelman declared at the time. Then, in January of this year, Caterpillar abruptly canceled the Peoria headquarters complex and said it would move about 300 top executives to the Chicago area. The local reaction wasn’t just disappointment but bewilderment. Three generations of the city’s residents have worked at Caterpillar — designing, assembling and painting tractors and pipelayers. If more jobs go, it will diminish the options for highly qualified managers and executives who have chosen to make their homes in Peoria. “The people who built this company from 1925 on were Peorians, they were Midwesterners,” said Rennie Atterbury, a longtime former Caterpillar executive and general counsel. “They weren’t city people.” n ©The Washington Post
SUNDAY, JULY 23, 2017
9
NATION
KLMNO WEEKLY
An eclipse chaser’s total commitment This man has seen 20 solar eclipses in his 52 years, but one in August is really special It didn’t look like the pictures in the textbook. It was more than that. It was being in the shadow of the moon, and I couldn’t quite comprehend the whole thing.” Mike Kentrianakis
S ARAH K APLAN New York BY
H
e approaches the first stranger with an expectant smile and an urgent query: “Do you know about the solar eclipse?” The man shakes his head, and Mike Kentrianakis is launched. He’s here at the Hayden Planetarium as an emissary of the American Astronomical Society, and his mission is to spread the word: On Aug. 21, the moon will pass between the sun and Earth, casting a shadow across a swath of the United States. The spectacle will be like nothing most people have ever seen. Carmen Irizarry, a science teacher from Staten Island, walks over with her two young granddaughters. She’s been thinking about taking them to a spot on the path of totality — where the moon will completely block out the sun for a few mesmerizing minutes. “I entirely encourage it,” Kentrianakis tells her. “It’s a completely different phenomenon. It shouldn’t even be called an eclipse. It should be called something else.” Kentrianakis would know. He has witnessed 20 solar eclipses in his 52 years, missing work, straining relationships and spending most of his life’s savings to chase the moon’s shadow across the globe. The pursuit has taken him to a mountaintop in Argentina, a jungle in Gabon, an ice field north of the Arctic Circle — exposing him to every type of eclipse there is to see, on every continent except Antarctica. Last year he watched one from an airplane 36,000 feet above the Pacific Ocean. The video of his rapturous reaction went viral, cementing his status as a “crazy eclipse guy,” as he jokingly calls himself. But it’s the Aug. 21 eclipse, the first in a century to cross the entire continental United States, that Kentrianakis has been looking forward to for a lifetime. As the moon races in its orbit around Earth, it will briefly pass between our planet and the sun, completely blocking out the sunlight for people standing in its 70-mile-
Mike Kentrianakis, then 14, first saw an eclipse in 1979 in Canada.
PHOTOS COURTESY OF MIKE KENTRIANAKIS
Kentrianakis, pictured in 1994, has seen eclipses on six continents.
In 2008, Kentrianakis traveled to Siberia for yet another viewing.
wide shadow. Over the course of an hour and a half, that shadow will follow the moon’s path across the continent, beginning off the Oregon coast and sweeping down to South Carolina. Finally, all of America will see what he has seen. Finally, “they’re going to understand.” “If it strikes you hard enough,” Kentrianakis says, “you will never be the same.” Kentrianakis was first struck on Feb. 26, 1979, in the middle of a snowy farm field in Manitoba. He was 14, and he’d been captivated by descriptions of eclipses in the college-level astronomy books he borrowed from the library. So when he heard that a team of New York scientists had a spare spot on an expedition to see the event from Canada, he begged his parents to lend him $400 for the trip. When the sky began to darken, “it was something that I just absolutely didn’t imagine,” Kentrianakis says. The staid scientists let out
almost animal yells of enthusiasm, cheering and laughing and narrating the three-minute event like sportscasters at a football game. Meanwhile, Kentrianakis stared in mute awe at the place where the sun should have been — now just a black hole in the sky. “It didn’t look like the pictures in the textbook,” he recalls. “It was more than that. It was being in the shadow of the moon, and I couldn’t quite comprehend the whole thing.” By the time he got back to Long Island, Kentrianakis was hooked. He subscribed to NASA’s annual eclipse circulars. He bought huge sheets of silver solar screens that can be fitted onto telescopes and camera lenses to let the user take pictures of the sun. Though Kentrianakis became a TV news producer after college, not an astronomer, he became a fixture in the tightknit community of eclipse chasers. Their bible is NASA’s massive
50-year Solar Eclipse Canon, a compendium of every eclipse the world will see for decades. Every 18 months or so, the orbits of the sun, moon and Earth align for a total solar eclipse. The moon — 400 times smaller than the sun but also 400 times closer — perfectly blocks the light of our star, casting part of Earth into shadow. In between those events are annular eclipses, which occur when the moon’s orbit takes it slightly further away from Earth, so it can no longer completely cover the sun. Instead, a faint ring of light around the moon remains visible in a violet sky. A lunar eclipse happens when Earth passes between the sun and the moon, blocking out the sunlight we usually see reflected off the moon’s rocky surface. All the information from the Canon is available online, but Kentrianakis still hauls around the copy he purchased in 1987. “This is where I do all my planning for my lifetime,” he says. It’s where he first read about the eclipse that will cross the United States this year. Back then, August 2017 seemed so far away. This year he drove the entire 3,000-mile path of totality, handing out glasses and spreading the gospel. He even brought up the viral clip of himself “losing it” during that eclipse over the Pacific. Whatever it took to persuade listeners not to miss this phenomenon. (Kentrianakis is still figuring out his plans for the big day.) “It unlocks you,” he says. “I don’t know why. It is so visceral. It is the meaning of the word awe, awe-struck.” And then he’s off, waxing rhapsodic about the light, the symmetry, the electricity in the air, the feeling of cosmic insignificance. It takes him a few minutes to come back to Earth. “I wish I could describe it in a normal fashion.” He sighs. “If I could give the magic words . . . if I say the right thing, I can get them to go.” But all Kentrianakis can offer is his own fervor and this promise: “Wait till you see it. Then you will know.” n ©The Washington Post
SUNDAY, JULY 23, 2017
10
KLMNO WEEKLY
WORLD
Iran’s president, hard-liners face o≠ E RIN C UNNINGHAM Istanbul BY
A
high-stakes power struggle between Iran’s moderate president and his hard-line opponents in the judiciary appeared to escalate with the arrest of the president’s brother and the conviction of an American student for espionage last weekend — rulings that seemed timed to embarrass the Iranian leader at home and abroad. President Hassan Rouhani, who was reelected in a landslide in May, has challenged the conservative establishment by pledging reforms in Iran and advocating diplomacy and openness toward the rest of the world. His recent criticisms of the hard-line judiciary and powerful security forces have prompted public rebukes from the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who wields ultimate authority in Iran. The tensions come as Iran and the United States spar over the terms of a nuclear deal struck with world powers to limit Iran’s nuclear weapons program. Last Monday, the White House grudgingly certified to Congress that Iran is in compliance with the deal, which was negotiated by the Obama administration and lifts major sanctions. The Trump administration has taken a much harsher stance on Iran, threatening to abandon the deal, and the Treasury Department last Tuesday announced new sanctions primarily targeting Iran’s ballistic missile program. But the moves by Iran’s judiciary — including the sentencing of a Princeton graduate student, Xiyue Wang, to 10 years in prison for spying — also undermine Rouhani’s attempts to build better relations with the West, which more-reactionary Iranian institutions such as the judiciary oppose. And they suggest an effort by ruling clerics to pressure the president to back down from confrontation on the domestic front, particularly ahead of the official inauguration of his second term next month, when
VAHID SALEMI/ASSOCIATED PRESS
Moves by judiciary appear timed to rattle Rouhani as he tries to improve ties with the West Rouhani will pick his new cabinet. More broadly, however, the actions by the judiciary and Khamenei paint a picture of a hard-line establishment hitting back at an outspoken and popular president who has promised to curb some of the regime’s worst excesses. Rouhani’s pro-reform agenda “poses a major threat to their worldview and political agenda,” Nader Hashemi, director of the Center for Middle East Studies at the University of Denver, said of the hard-liners. In recent weeks as well as during the May presidential campaign, Rouhani rapped the judiciary for what he said were arbitrary arrests and a history of atrocities. He also criticized the economic role of the elite Revolutionary Guard Corps, Iran’s most powerful security institution, at the expense of the country’s private sector. Those admonishments led
Khamenei to publicly defend the judiciary. “The judiciary should be a pioneer in establishing public rights within the society . . . and confront anyone who violates laws,” Khamenei said in a speech this month, according to the Center for Human Rights in Iran, an independent nonprofit based in New York. Rouhani, addressing a gathering of judicial officials the previous day, had called on jurists to limit the practice of summoning people for interrogation without due cause. Last month, Khamenei dressed down the president in front of the country’s most senior politicians, warning Rouhani against suffering a fate similar to that of Iran’s first post-revolution president, who served from 1980 to 1981. Abol Hassan Bani-Sadr was impeached after facing off against the powerful clergy and was forced to flee to France. “Using the institutions of the
Above, Iranian President Hassan Rouhani was reelected in May. But his pro-reform agenda “poses a major threat” to his opponents, one analyst said. Below, Hossein Fereydoun, Rouhani’s brother, was arrested last weekend after being targeted by conservatives.
state that they control — primarily the judiciary — they are sending a message to Rouhani and his supporters that they are in control of the political system,” Hashemi said. “And that they will oppose his attempts to engage with the Western world and promote more freedoms at home.” The arrest and conviction of Wang, a 37-year-old scholar at Princeton, appeared to target Rouhani’s wider foreign policy and engagement with the West. Although Wang was detained in August 2016, the timing of the verdict is suspect, analysts say. “Why did they keep it a secret as long as they did? Timing is important,” said Alex Vatanka, an Iran expert at the Middle East Institute in Washington. Wang, who colleagues say traveled to Iran to research the Persian Empire’s Qajar dynasty for his thesis, was accused of attempting to create a digital archive for the State Department and Western academic institutions. But the arrest of Rouhani’s brother, Hossein Fereydoun, appeared to be a more immediate and direct attack on Rouhani. Fereydoun is a close adviser of the president and was a key player in nuclear negotiations. He came under attack by conservatives this year for alleged financial impropriety, although the formal charges are still unclear. Whether Rouhani will bow to the pressure remains to be seen. During his first term, the president deferred to the supreme leader and failed to push through more-serious reforms. The relationship between Rouhani and Khamenei in the coming years “will be tense,” Hashemi said. “There has been an ongoing public feud between both figures, but ultimately power lies with the supreme leader.” “If I had to bet, my bet would be for Rouhani to reluctantly submit to the limits established by the supreme leader,” he said. “All second-term Iranian presidents had to do this.” n ©The Washington Post
SUNDAY, JULY 23, 2017
11
WORLD
KLMNO WEEKLY
London fire survivors wait for homes BY G RIFF W ITTE AND K ARLA A DAM
London
F
or nearly five hours last month, Antonio Roncolato waited to be rescued as a monstrous blaze consumed the London high-rise he had called home for more than a quarter-century. When firefighters found him, he was wearing swimming goggles to protect his eyes from the advancing smoke and flames. Now he’s waiting again — for the replacement home that authorities promised him to compensate for the fire at Grenfell Tower, which rendered him and hundreds of others homeless and killed at least 80 people. So far, the wait has been in vain. “Should I receive something below what we had?” asked the 57-year-old restaurant manager. “No way. I’m saying the same level. At least the same level.” But in London, where affordable housing has become an endangered species, that is proving exceptionally difficult to find. Of the 158 families who survived the blaze and have been offered new homes by authorities, just 14 had accepted as of a few weeks ago. Most of the others remain in hotels, having declined options they see as falling short of what they had at Grenfell. Roncolato is hardly surprised. “Of course they don’t have them,” Roncolato said. “London is a place where they build and build and build — but for the richest and well-off.” The Grenfell fire illustrated in searing fashion the perils of life in Britain’s public housing high-rises, where years of unheeded warnings, slashed costs and deregulation all added up to a tragedy unlike any Britain has seen in at least a century. But the aftermath has shined a spotlight on a different problem with Britain’s strained-to-thebreaking-point housing system — a severe shortage of affordable options that has left people desperate for a roof over their heads.
JACK TAYLOR/GETTY IMAGES
Former residents of Grenfell Tower reckon with Britain’s severe shortage of public housing The lack of viable alternatives helps explain why there has been no mass exodus from Britain’s public housing towers, even after cladding at 190 buildings has failed fire-safety tests ordered in the wake of the Grenfell disaster. Until the cladding is removed, the buildings could be vulnerable. But at least residents have a home in a public housing system suffering from a grievous mismatch between supply and demand. “The overall quantity of social housing has declined and the number of people needing it has risen,” said Anne Power, a social-policy professor at the London School of Economics. “So the pressures on social housing have expanded enormously.” The pressure can be seen in the statistics, which show that some 1.4 million families are on waiting lists for public housing across England and Scotland. Once people are on the list, their wait times can stretch well over a year. As opportunities to live in pub-
lic housing have dwindled, the number of people in substandard private housing has grown as rents rapidly rise. The ranks of the homeless have also surged, increasing by 17 percent over the past five years, according to the housing advocacy group Shelter. “Many local authorities simply don’t have enough affordable accommodation for those on low incomes,” Anne Baxendale, Shelter’s director of policy, said in a statement. “It’s a similar story across all London boroughs and the country more widely.” How it got to be that way is a story decades in the making. As of 1980, about a third of homes in Britain were considered public housing. Today, that number has been cut nearly in half. Starting with Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, successive Conservative governments have pushed people away from public housing in an effort to reduce dependence on government. Most critically, Thatcher allowed
Protesters demonstrate in London days after the fire. As opportunities to live in public housing have dwindled, the number of people in substandard private housing has grown as rents rapidly rise.
“I’m not expecting anything for free. I just want what I had before,”said Antonio Roncolato, who lived in Grenfell Tower for more than 25 years.
public-housing tenants the right to buy their homes at deep discounts. Conservatives celebrate the program as a boon to social mobility. But housing that was once reserved for society’s most vulnerable has become unaffordable as it has been sold up the property ladder. In the meantime, budgets for local authorities have been slashed, and construction of new public housing has dramatically slowed since the 1960s and 1970s, when a building boom yielded hundreds of concrete-block towers, including Grenfell. After the fire, London Mayor Sadiq Khan floated the idea of demolishing those towers, writing in the Guardian that “it may well be the defining outcome of this tragedy that the worst mistakes of the 1960s and 1970s are systematically torn down.” Khan said his proposal was contingent on new public housing being built to replace the old. But Power and other housing experts are leery of any moves that could further reduce the supply, especially in booming areas such as London, where lowincome people are already being crowded out. Experts say it was an upgrade at Grenfell that may have contributed to the fire’s astonishingly fast spread. Investigators have said they believe the building’s exterior cladding, added during a recent renovation and cheaper than a fire-resistant model, helped transmit the blaze from one floor to the next. Roncolato moved into Grenfell in 1990 with his then-wife as they were expecting a child. He has declined two offers of new housing — one outside the borough, the other in a basement on a busy road — and is still waiting for authorities to make good on their vows to rehouse people locally in units comparable with the ones they had at Grenfell. “We pay our rent, council tax, road tax, parking permit, whatever needs to be done,” he said. “I’m not expecting anything for free. I just want what I had before.” n ©The Washington Post
COVER STORY POOL PHOTO BY ANDREW HARRER VIA EUROPEAN PRESSPHOTO AGENCY
The first daughter talks about improving the lives of working women. Her father urges companies to ‘buy American.’ But her fashion line’s practices collide with those principles — and are out of step with industry trends.
O
BY MATEA GOLD, DREW HARWELL, MAHER SATTAR AND SIMON DENYER
PHOTOS BY MATT MCCLAIN/THE WASHINGTON POST
Among the items, from top, are a jacket made in Bangladesh, a blouse from China, a dress made in Indonesia and a jacket from Vietnam.
n Inauguration Day, President Trump stood in front of the U.S. Capitol and vowed that his “America First” agenda would bring jobs back to the United States. “We must protect our borders from the ravages of other countries making our products, stealing our companies and destroying our jobs,” he declared, adding: “We will follow two simple rules — buy American and hire American.” Looking on from the front of the stage was Trump’s daughter Ivanka, the celebrity and fashion entrepreneur who would soon join him in the White House. The first daughter’s cause would be improving the lives of working women, a theme she had developed at her clothing line. She also brought a direct link to the global economy the president was railing against — a connection that was playing out at that very moment on the Pacific coast. As the Trumps stood on stage, a hulking
container ship called the OOCL Ho Chi Minh City was pulling into the harbor of Long Beach, Calif., carrying around 500 pounds of foreignmade Ivanka Trump spandex-knit blouses. Another 10 ships hauling Ivanka Trumpbranded shoes, cardigans and leather handbags bound for the United States were floating in the north Pacific and Atlantic oceans and off the coasts of Malta, Malaysia, Japan, South Korea and Yemen. Those global journeys — along with millions of pounds of Ivanka Trump products imported into the United States in more than 2,000 shipments since 2010 — illustrate how her business practices collide with some of the key principles she and her father have championed in the White House. While President Trump has chastised companies for outsourcing jobs overseas, an examination by The Washington Post has revealed the extent to which Ivanka Trump’s company relies exclusively on foreign factories in countries such as Bangladesh, Indonesia and China, where low-wage laborers have limited ability to advocate for themselves. And while Ivanka Trump published a book this spring declaring that improving the lives of working women is “my life’s mission,” The Post found that her company lags behind many in the apparel industry when it comes to monitoring the treatment of the largely female workforce employed in factories around the world. From big brands such as Adidas and Kenneth Cole to smaller, newer players like California-based Everlane, many U.S. clothing companies have in recent years made protecting factory workers abroad a priority — hiring independent auditors to monitor labor conditions, pressing factory owners to make improvements and providing consumers with details about the overseas facilities where their goods are produced. But the Trump brand has taken a more hands-off approach. Although executives say they have a code of conduct that prohibits
PHOTOS BY MATT MCCLAIN/THE WASHINGTON POST
physical abuse and child labor, the company relies on its suppliers to abide by the policy. The clothing line declined to disclose the language of the code. Trump, who now works full time in the White House, has stepped away from daily operations of her business. She has assumed a high-profile place on the world stage — a role that was on display recently when she briefly filled in for her father during a meeting with foreign leaders, seated between the president of China and the British prime minister. Trump still owns her company, which has faced increasing scrutiny in recent months for its use of overseas factories, and her representatives have said she has the power to veto new deals. Trump did not respond to requests for comment about what efforts she made to oversee her company’s supply chain before she joined the administration. Her attorney Jamie Gorelick told The Post in a statement that Trump is “concerned” about recent reports regarding the treatment of factory workers and “expects that the company will respond appropriately.” In the wake of Trump’s departure, the brand has begun to explore hiring a nonprofit workers’ rights group to increase oversight of its production and help improve factory conditions, the company’s executives told The Post. Abigail Klem, who has been a top executive at the brand since 2013 and its president since January, said she is planning her first trip to tour some of the facilities that make Ivanka Trump products in the coming year. Klem said she is confident that the company’s suppliers operate “at the highest standards,” adding, “Ivanka sought to partner with the best in the industry.” The company had not yet matched the policies of other labels because it was newer and smaller, she added, but is now focusing on what more it can do. “The mission of this brand has always been to inspire and empower women to create the lives they want to live and give them tools to do
that,” Klem said. “We’re looking to ensure that we can sort of live this mission from top to bottom with our licensees, with our supply chain.” The company still has no immediate plans to follow the emerging industry trend of publishing the names and locations of factories that produce its goods. It declined to provide a list of the facilities. The Post used data drawn from U.S. customs logs and international shipping records to trace Trump-branded products from far-flung factories to ports around the United States. The Post also interviewed workers at three garment factories that have made Trump products who said their jobs often come with exhausting hours, subsistence pay and insults from supervisors if they don’t work fast enough. “My monthly salary is not enough for everyday expenses, also not for the future,” said a 26-year-old sewing machine operator in Subang, Indonesia, who said she has helped make Trump dresses. Like many U.S.-based apparel companies, the Trump brand signs deals with suppliers, which, in turn, contract manufacturing work to factories around the world. The system allows products to be sold to consumers for lower prices and creates economic opportunity — and risks — for workers in poor regions. In China, where three activists investigating factories making her line were recently arrested, assembly-line workers produce Ivanka Trump woven blouses, shoes and handbags. Laborers in Indonesia stitch together her dresses and knit tops. Suit jackets are assembled in Vietnam, cotton tops in India and denim pants in Bangladesh — a country with a huge apparel industry where garment workers typically earn a minimum wage of about $70 a month and where some have recently faced a harsh crackdown from factory owners after seeking higher pay. And in Ethiopia, where manufacturers have boasted of paying workers a fifth of what they earn in Chinese factories, workers made thou-
“The mission of this brand has always been to inspire and empower women to create the lives they want to live and give them tools to do that.” Abigail Klem, president of the Ivanka Trump brand
sands of pounds of Ivanka Trump-brand shoes in 2013, shipping data show. Klem, the Trump brand president, said the company is exploring ways to produce some goods in the United States but that “to do it at a large scale is currently not possible.” Klem spoke to The Post in the fashion line’s offices on the 23rd floor of Trump Tower, three floors below the headquarters of the Trump Organization. On a table next to her lay a copy of a 2016 Business of Fashion report, “Unravelling the Myth of ‘Made in America.’ ” “The workers no longer exist here or only in very small, small capacity; the machinery in many instances does not exist here,” Klem said. “It is a very complex problem.” Industry experts say about 97 percent of all clothing and shoes purchased in the United States is imported from countries where wages are lower and products can be made more cheaply. If Ivanka Trump’s company followed the president’s exhortations to move production to the United States, its prices would rise dramatically, potentially pushing buyers away and dragging down company profits, according to industry experts. The Institute for Global Labour and Human Rights, a nonprofit organization, estimated in 2013 that a denim shirt that cost $3.72 to make in Bangladesh would cost more than three times as much to make in the United States. Instead of pulling production back into the United States, the apparel industry has been focused on a different strategy: trying to reassure American consumers that their retail purchases are not the result of exploitation. A wide range of clothing lines now inspect their own supply chains to make sure labor standards are met, the companies say. Among them is Levi Strauss, which, like Trump’s brand, licenses some of its production from a large New York-based clothing distributor called G-III Apparel. A Levi spokeswoman told The Post that the company inspects its production facilities annually and has published factory information continues on next page
SUNDAY, JULY 23, 2017
14
KLMNO WEEKLY
COVER STORY
from previous page
since 2005. Many smaller brands turn to industrybacked groups, such as the Fair Labor Association or the Sustainable Apparel Coalition, to help address factory conditions and worker treatment. Krochet Kids, which sells dresses for less than $60, includes clothing tags hand-signed by workers at its facilities in Uganda and Peru. Reformation, whose dress Trump wore to a recent congressional picnic, screens its overseas suppliers and recently moved to an expanded factory in downtown Los Angeles, where it offers guided tours. “The questions today aren’t whether to engage in [monitoring factories], but whether to go beyond, all the way down to the cotton fields,” said Doug Cahn, a former Reebok executive who pioneered the development of corporate codes of conduct and now consults for brands and manufacturers. The Trump company’s relatively passive approach is notable — as is its lack of participation in industry efforts to improve conditions for workers, according to labor advocates. “I have been doing this stuff for 20 years, and I have never seen her brand in any of these venues,” said Judy Gearhart, executive director of the International Labor Rights Forum. Klem said that “as a small, young brand, we did not have the chance to influence the debate around social compliance issues, but that has obviously changed during this past year.” “We recognize that our brand name carries a special responsibility,” she added. The Ivanka brand: From glitzy jewelry to #WomenWhoWork Ivanka Trump was a 26-year-old model and guest judge on her father’s reality show, “The Apprentice,” when she took on her first solo venture outside the family business: lending her name and creative energy to a Manhattan diamond boutique. From the beginning, Trump said she envisioned Ivanka Trump Fine Jewelry as a glitzy refuge for the upper crust. In a 2007 Arabian Business magazine profile, headlined “Daddy’s Girl,” Ivanka Trump said the jewelry, mostly priced between $5,000 and $50,000, would be marketed to ambitious, wealthy women who “have everything, yet . . . nothing to prove.” Initially, Trump’s brand put an emphasis on sustainability. In 2011, her company introduced a short-lived bridal jewelry collection made from “eco-friendly” Canadian-mined diamonds and recycled platinum. The following year, entrepreneur Russell Simmons’ Diamond Empowerment Fund, a nonprofit organization that works to help educate youth in diamond-producing countries, gave her its “Newest and Brightest” award. By then, she had started expanding into other products, eventually signing deals for clothes, shoes and handbags. Shipping data show that tons of Ivanka Trump-brand shoes were rolling off factory
ANDRI TAMBUNAN FOR THE WASHINGTON POST
GREG BAKER/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE VIA GETTY IMAGES
production lines in Dongguan, the sprawling industrial city in southern China, and onto container ships with names such as APL Beijing and Hyundai Dynasty. Trump’s clothing line — styled to sell an image of modern metropolitan glamour — quickly became the core of her business, with mid-market prices and an expanding collection of stylish pumps, off-the-shoulder tops and flower-print cocktail dresses. In late 2012, Trump signed a deal with G-III, an established apparel group known for its work with Guess, Calvin Klein and celebrity brands such as Jessica Simpson. Trump’s collection flourished and, with it, production ramped up in G-III’s contract factories across China and Vietnam, according to shipping data. In 2016, G-III told Forbes that the Ivanka Trump clothing line had generated $100 million in retail revenue in the past year. In last year’s presidential campaign, Trump took the opportunity to showcase her products on the national stage. After she paid tribute to her father at the Republican National Convention in one of her soft-pink sheath dresses, her social media team urged buyers to “shop Ivanka’s look,” and the $138 Chinese-made dress quickly sold out. In the company’s Trump Tower headquarters, a staff of about 16 employees runs the
TOP: K., a PT Buma garment worker whose full name is being withheld because she fears being punished or fired for speaking to the media, makes about $173 a month, the Indonesian region’s minimum wage. ABOVE: A laborer works on a production line at the Huajian shoe factory in Dongguan, China, last September.
Ivanka Trump design team, social media accounts and branding campaigns — including #WomenWhoWork, a movement-as-hashtag that emerged as the company’s driving motto. Its marketing mixes promotions for evening bags with celebrations of female power. What was once advertised as trendy clothing for women in “the boardroom and beyond” has evolved into what IvankaTrump.com calls “a solution-oriented lifestyle brand, dedicated to the mission of inspiring and empowering women to create the lives they want to lead.” In recent months, however, efforts to market the upbeat Ivanka Trump clothing brand have run headlong into the polarizing Trump political brand. After Nordstrom dropped her line in February, citing low sales, the president complained on Twitter that his daughter had been “treated so unfairly,” and pro-Trump supporters rushed to buy her products. Presidential counselor Kellyanne Conway drew a rebuke from federal ethics officials for telling TV viewers, from the White House press room, to “go buy Ivanka’s stuff.” Detractors of the president, meanwhile, have posted negative reviews of Ivanka Trump items online, needling her for relying on foreign labor. Klem said the controversies have not hurt sales. She declined to disclose figures but said that the brand’s business is “growing rapidly.” Revenue was up 21 percent in 2016, with continuing growth in 2017, executives said. ‘We are the ultra-poor’ In May, Lord & Taylor stores showcased the newest items in the Ivanka Trump denim collection: a series of indigo, white and pink pants retailing for $79. Affixed to each was a label brandishing the #WomenWhoWork slogan, featuring aspirational admonishments such as “Act purposefully” and “Invest in each other.” The labels on the jeans show they were made for G-III Apparel in Bangladesh, whose garment industry has weathered a series of deadly factory disasters, including a 2013 building collapse that killed more than 1,100 workers. After that tragedy, brands such as Walmart and Gap vowed to pay for safety training for factory managers. Shipping records do not reveal which factories in the country produce Ivanka Trump goods, and both the brand and G-III refused to say which facilities make her products. G-III spokesman Chris Giglio said the company’s supply chain is “routinely audited by us and by independent third parties. When issues arise, we work with our local partners to find and implement safe, fair and sustainable solutions.” Along with facing safety risks, Bangladeshi garment workers toil for one of the world’s lowest minimum wages. “We are the ultra-poor,” said Kalpona Akter, a Bangladeshi labor organizer and former garment worker who was first hired by a factory at the age of 12. “We are making you
SUNDAY, JULY 23, 2017
15
COVER STORY
KLMNO WEEKLY
ELIAS MESERET/ASSOCIATED PRESS
beautiful, but we are starving.” In December, thousands of workers seeking higher pay went on strike outside the capital city of Dhaka. In response, police rounded up and arrested several dozen labor organizers, and factory owners filed criminal complaints against hundreds of workers, according to Human Rights Watch. An estimated 1,500 garment workers were suspended or fired. At a Dhaka apparel summit in February, U.S. Ambassador Marcia S. Bernicat described the mass firings and arrests as “a giant, disappointing step backwards on labor rights” and warned that international buyers “have to ask themselves how they will sell garments made in a country where large numbers of workers and union leaders are suddenly arrested, fired or suspended simply because they or their fellow workers asked for a wage increase.” A number of apparel brands have called on factories to halt the worker crackdown. A spokesman for H&M told The Post that it has instructed Dhaka factory owners that the company will pull its business unless the factories reinstate the fired workers and drop the criminal complaints. Trump’s brand and G-III have not publicly addressed the crackdown. Klem said that the company’s code of conduct gives workers in its supply chain “the right to freely associate in accordance with the laws of the countries in which they are employed.” In recent years, hundreds of clothing lines
and manufacturers have poured millions into financing safety improvements in garment factories through two major initiatives, the Accord on Fire and Building Safety in Bangladesh and the Alliance for Bangladesh Worker Safety, a group made up of 29 North American retailers. Neither Trump’s company nor G-III Apparel has contributed to those efforts, according to program officials. But a factory used last year by a G-III subsidiary has benefited from the safety initiatives, according to U.S. customs records and Bangladeshi government reports. The factory, That’s It Sports Wear Ltd., the site of a 2010 fire that killed 29 employees, worked with both programs to install fire doors, sprinklers and other safety improvements, records show. The Ha-Meem Group, which owns the factory, does not produce Ivanka Trump goods, the company’s chairman, A.K. Azad, told The Post. Jessica Champagne, deputy director for field operations and strategy at the Worker Rights Consortium, an independent monitoring group, said that “any responsible brand sourcing from Bangladesh” should support the accord. Klem said the company would consider doing so if its yet-to-be-hired workers rights consultant recommends such a move. G-III did not respond to questions about why it does not participate in the factory improvement program. At a panel discussion
Factory workers make shoes at the Chinese firm Huajian’s plant outside Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, in January. The facility made thousands of pounds of Ivanka Trumpbrand shoes in 2013, shipping data show.
last year, one of its executives noted that the distributor has a set of standards that its facilities must meet. “We have a team on the ground running around every factory in Asia and visiting these factories and drilling it into their head what these requirements mean,” Adam Ziedenweber, G-III’s vice president of global sourcing compliance, said in the March 2016 event at the Benjamin N. Cardozo Law School. “You know, the retailers, the consumers aren’t asking for it,” he said. “None of the consumers say, ‘Well, this was made in a building that was going to fall down.’ ” Unable to make ends meet Financial insecurity is a constant companion for the predominantly female workforce at PT Buma, a factory in Indonesia’s West Java province that produced a batch of Ivankabranded knit dresses that shipping records show arrived in Newark on Jan. 18, two days before Trump’s inauguration. K., a 26-year-old sewing-machine operator, told The Post that she makes the equivalent of $173 a month, the region’s minimum wage. Her full name, like that of other workers, is being withheld by The Post because the workers fear being punished or fired for speaking to the media. She said she spends $23 to rent her small studio in the bustling factory town of Subang, continues on next page
SUNDAY, JULY 23, 2017
16
KLMNO WEEKLY
COVER STORY
from previous page
where she sleeps on a mattress on the floor and hangs her clothes from a string hung along the wall. She saves the rest for her 2-year-old daughter but worries she will not be able to afford elementary school fees, which can cost as much as $225 a year. With no child care, K. is forced to leave the toddler at home with her parents in their village, a journey of about 90 minutes away by motorbike across the rice fields. On the weekend, she joins an exodus of parents from Subang who clamber onto motorbikes and into shared vans, racing home for brief reunions. A 25-year-old woman said PT Buma hires her as a fabric cutter on a day-to-day basis, paying her a monthly salary that ranges between $68 to $135 for as much as 24 days of work — far below the region’s minimum wage and a rate that workers advocates say is probably a violation of local law. The fabric cutter and her husband have to borrow money to cover their daily expenses and those of their 10-year-old son, who lives 45 minutes away with his grandmother. She sees him about once a month. Inside the factory, workers said supervisors berate employees if they fall behind their targets or if stitches need to be redone. PT Buma participates in Better Work, an international program to improve garment industry conditions, according to the Better Work website. A PT Buma representative who declined to give his name said the factory no longer produces Ivanka Trump clothing. He said the company refused to answer any more questions and abruptly ended the call. When asked about the working environment at PT Buma, Klem said in a statement that the brand hopes to develop programs to support the “thousands of women” in its supply chain. For K., the dresses she has helped produce — which retail for as much as $138 — seem as out of reach as the daughter of the U.S. president herself, whose name the worker said she now wishes she had chosen for her own little girl. “Ivanka clothes are beautiful, expensive, sexy — just perfect,” she said. Employees express a fear of retaliation The dangers to workers who try to seek better labor conditions are especially acute in China, where activists say heavy surveillance and police presences are used to protect company profits and the country’s lucrative reputation as the “factory of the world.” Yen Sheng, a Hong Kong-based company with factories in Dongguan where workers are paid between $190 and $289 a month, has shipped thousands of pounds of Ivanka Trump cowhide-leather handbags and other items since 2015, customs records show. Employees in Dongguan told The Post that the company withholds sick pay unless they are hospitalized and avoids paying overtime by outsourcing work to the unregulated oneroom factories that dot Dongguan’s back streets. But pressing for change is not an
MELINA MARA/THE WASHINGTON POST
Asian shipments helped build Ivanka Trump’s brand Hundreds of ships imported foreign-made Ivanka Trump goods from Asian countries to the United States from January 2016 to May 2017. Departure port
Arrival port
Ship’s path
More than 200 ships came from ports in China. Tacoma
New York
L.A.
Ten ships brought tank tops from ports in Indonesia and Singapore.
Twenty ships left Hong Kong carrying blouses and leather handbags.
Sources: FleetMon, MarineTraffic, Panjiva
GABRIEL FLORIT/THE WASHINGTON POST
option, they said. “If you don’t work, other people will,” one woman at the company’s Dongguan subsidiary Yen Hing Leather Works said. “If you protest, the company will ask the police to handle it. The owner is very rich. He can ask the police to come.” Trump brand executives said its products are not made at Yen Hing. A manager at the Dongguan factory, Huang Huihong, told The Post that its workers have produced Ivanka Trump goods in the past. Officials at Yen Hing denied the workers’ allegations, saying they “strictly follow the laws in our business operation.” Mondani, the Trump brand’s handbag supplier, did not respond to requests for comment. The work conditions at Chinese factories that make Trump’s products have gained public attention recently after the detentions of three activists from a group called China Labor Watch who were investigating the facilities. The group said it found evidence at one facility of laborers working 18-hour days and enduring verbal abuse from managers, allegations that the Chinese factory denied. Chinese authorities accused the activists of using illegal surveillance equipment and sug-
Kalpona Akter, a former garment worker, is the executive director of the Bangladesh Center for Worker Solidarity, one of the country’s most prominent labor rights advocacy organizations.
gested they might have been selling commercial secrets to foreign entities. They were released on bail in late June. A trial is pending. The State Department denounced the arrests, saying that labor rights activists “have been instrumental in helping . . . American companies understand the conditions involving their supply chains.” Li Qiang, the group’s executive director, said it had never faced such police pressure in nearly two decades of experience investigating factories and said he believes this case was handled differently because “this is Ivanka Trump’s factory.” Hua Haifeng, one of the detained activists, told The Post after his release, “The first question the police asked was to the effect of ‘whether you know it’s Ivanka Trump’s factory and then came here to investigate.’ ” Local police officials did not respond to requests for comment. Li’s group says it has sent four letters since April to Ivanka Trump at the White House detailing the working conditions in the factory and asking for her to advocate for their colleagues. Deng Guilian, Hua’s wife, also pleaded with Trump to intervene, telling The Post, “For her, it’s just a matter of a few words, but those few words would save the entire family.” Trump has not spoken publicly about the case. Gorelick, her attorney, told The Post that Trump, because of her White House role, “has been advised that she cannot ask the government to act in an issue involving the brand in any way, constraining her ability to intervene personally.” Klem said in a statement that while the factory has not produced Trump goods since March, “the integrity of our supply chain is a top priority and we take all allegations very seriously.” The company that supplies Trumpbrand shoes, Marc Fisher, said it would look into the allegations. In the meantime, Trump has been increasing her international profile as an advocate for working women. During a trip this spring with her father to Saudi Arabia, she told a group of Saudi female leaders that she aims “to help empower women in the United States and around the globe.” In May, she published her book, “Women Who Work,” in which she detailed her commitment to promoting equitable work conditions. “As a leader and a mother, I feel it’s as much my responsibility to cultivate an environment that supports people — and the roles we hold, both in our family and business lives — as it is to post profits,” Trump wrote. “One cannot suffer at the expense of the other — they go hand in hand.” In late June, she helped unveil the State Department’s latest human-trafficking report, which labeled China one of the world’s worst offenders on forced labor. “Let us recommit ourselves,” she said, “to finding those still in the shadows of exploitation.” n © The Washington Post
SUNDAY, JULY 23, 2017
17
ECONOMY
KLMNO WEEKLY
More people making retirement wait BY
J ENA M C G REGOR
L
ife after 65 is starting to look a lot more like life at . . . 64. The percentage of Americans working past the traditional retirement age hit new highs in the most recent jobs numbers, according to recent reports, with 19 percent of those 65 and older working at least parttime. And it’s only expected to increase: The over-65 set is expected to be the fastest-growing demographic in the workplace by 2024, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. So what are companies doing to respond? A few have redesigned manufacturing plants to adapt. Some lucky employees are getting higher 401(k) matches to help them save. More recently, many companies have launched financial wellness programs to help employees of all ages make sure they’re better prepared to retire on time. Meanwhile, one might assume “phased retirement” programs, a benefit begun 15 years ago or so to help employees gradually step away from their jobs, would be hotter than ever, offered to give workers a way to keep working part-time or in alternate arrangements while helping companies hold on to workers with valuable skills. But the numbers don’t show that. According to WorldatWork, a nonprofit human resources association, the percentage of companies that offer the benefit — 29 percent — dipped slightly in 2017, and growth has stalled over the past six years. The Society of Human Resources Management, whose surveys include more small and mid-size companies, found that the use of formal phased retirement programs is just 6 percent — roughly the same as in recent years — while informal use of the idea has ticked up to just 13 percent. “We haven’t seen a flood of large employers saying we want to have phased retirement programs lock stock and barrel,” said Roselyn Feinsod, a senior partner in Aon Hewitt’s retirement practice.
TRACY A. WOODWARD/THE WASHINGTON POST
An increasing amount of Americans are working past 65, so some companies are adapting “We just haven’t seen a huge prevalence.” However, that doesn’t necessarily mean employers are being more stingy about a more gradual retirement. Human resources experts say that instead, companies are offering the option to near-retirees under the broader umbrella of flexible work arrangements — a development that could help older workers in some ways, but possibly hurt if they work for organizations where flexibility isn’t as highly valued. “If there’s anything employers want, it's a committed employee,” said Jacquelyn James, co-director of the Center on Aging and Work at Boston College. “They don’t want a sign they’re one foot in and one out the door.” Phased retirement, human resources experts say, emerged in the early 2000s as companies grew concerned about a babyboomer exodus. The programs saw an uptick in popularity around the middle of that decade
after regulatory changes helped address questions about how traditional pension benefits would be paid out, said Lenny Sanicola, a senior practice leader at WorldatWork, but then the benefit fell in popularity during the Great Recession, as so many workers thought they could no longer retire. The prevailing trend now is to include the option in the parttime, job sharing and other flexible arrangements that the employer offers to all workers. “There’s been a leveling off” in offering a distinct benefit, Sanicola said. “I think it’s being done more on an informal basis.” One upside to this trend for older workers, James said, is that employees won’t have to be as clear about their plans with their boss. “The phased retirement [benefit] has a lot of complications to it,” she said. “It means you are signaling to the organization that you’re retiring,” even years out, when more promotions or big
Job seekers 55 and older at the District's Department of Employment. More workers 65 and older are remaining on the job, and firms are trying to make sure they’re better prepared to handle that.
assignments could be in store. Another issue with more formal programs, she said, is that they often require employees to set a date when they plan to retire — a decision that could change over time. Still, she points out that people who work for bosses who frown upon flexible work arrangements more broadly could have a tougher time. “The downside will be if the organization has [flexible] policies on the books but doesn’t really support them,” she said. “If you know the manager thinks that’s a whole bunch of gobbledygook from HR,” employees might not ask for them. Renee McGowan, who leads Mercer’s global retirement savings and financial wellness business, said there’s also “absolutely” a risk that such approaches to flexibility won’t help older workers if employers don’t communicate them well, and they seem more oriented toward, say, parents of young children. In addition to the shift in flexibility programs for older workers, McGowan and others said the recognition that people aren’t financially ready to retire has made “financial well-being” programs a popular new corporate benefit. The benefit, which can include financial education, actual coaching and advice have grown in popularity in recent years but “have become really hot this year,” McGowan said. An Aon Hewitt report found that almost 50 percent of the employers it surveyed were creating a strategy to do more to help workers with their financial health. The most sophisticated companies, McGowan said, are recognizing that this is a challenge that’s here to stay, and trying to make the most of it, planning for a future where the skills and careers of over-65 workers are very much part of the workforce. “There is this large shift from a world where employers really wanted people to retire at 65,” she said, “to one where they realize that may not be a reality, either on the part of employers or employees.” n ©The Washington Post
SUNDAY, JULY 23, 2017
18
KLMNO WEEKLY
BOOKS
Literary lives no longer in the cards N ONFICTION
T THE CARD CATALOG Books, Cards, and Literary Treasures By Library of Congress Chronicle. 224 pp. $35
l
REVIEWED BY
M ICHAEL L INDGREN
his book about card catalogues, written and published in cooperation with the Library of Congress, is beautifully produced, intelligently written and lavishly illustrated. It also sent me into a week-long depression. If you are a book lover of a certain age, it might do the same to you. “The Card Catalog” is many things: a lucid overview of the history of bibliographic practices, a paean to the Library of Congress, a memento of the cherished card catalogues of yore and an illustrated collection of bookish trivia. The text provides a concise history of literary compendiums from the Pinakes of the fabled Library of Alexandria to the advent of computerized book inventory databases, which began to appear as early as 1976. The illustrations are amazing: luscious reproductions of dozens of cards, lists, covers, title pages and other images guaranteed to bring a wistful gleam to the book nerd’s eye. For someone who grew up in and around libraries, it is also a poignant reminder of a vanished world. Now, waxing nostalgic about card catalogues or being an advocate for the importance of libraries is a mug’s game. You can practically feel people glancing up from their iPhones to smile tolerantly at your eccentricity. My response to this, after an initial burst of profanity, is to explain (again) why libraries are essential to narrowing the inequality gap, and why the Internet is not an adequate substitute for books or libraries. “The Card Catalog” is a heady antidote to the technophilia threatening our culture. The book is especially illuminating on the powerful, if overlooked, properties of the humble catalogue card, some 79 million of which were printed annually at the system’s peak in 1969. Each one is a perfect melding of design and utility, a marvel of informational compression and precision. In his introduction, Peter Devereaux calls rightly calls the catalogue “one of the most versatile
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS VIA CHRONICLE BOOKS
and durable technologies in history,” one that lasted almost a century, until 1980, when the Library switched completely to a computerized system. Although some contemporary readers might consider this book outrageously quaint, the card catalogue’s conceptual structure was the underpinning of the Internet; the idea of something being “tagged” by category owes its existence as an organizing principle to the subject headings delineated by the Library of Congress. A national card catalogue system was the original “search engine” — one that needed no electricity, no service providers or broadband or smartphones, and that was truly democratic. The slow obsolescence of this marvelous informational structure
lends a palpable sense of loss to the book’s narrative. Devereaux quotes historian Barbara Tuchman as referring to the card catalogue as “a companion all my working life.” As it happens, Tuchman voiced this soulful plaint in a 1985 talk at the New York Public Library, in which she went on to express considerable skepticism about the vaunted capabilities of digital search. The book also summons the specter of a bygone American faith in the ability of institutions of government to work for a common good. The idea of the Library of Congress implementing a nationally standardized system to classify and track the nation’s collective publication history is now as surely a part of the past as steam engines or top hats. Looked at this way, the card catalogue stands with other great
20th-century works of civic architecture as testament to the potential of what a society — and a government — can achieve. For some readers, the sense of personal nostalgia engendered by this book is piercing. When I think of the books that shaped me, I think of the works of Kael and Angell, of James and Didion and Updike and Roth and Exley, in their Boston Public Library plastic casings, piled high on a rickety desk in some shabby hovel of my young adulthood. I owe my existence as a reader, as a thinker, as a writer, as a person to libraries. This book reminds me of that, even as it reminds me of how much has been lost. n Lindgren is a regular contributor to The Washington Post.
SUNDAY, JULY 23, 2017
19
BOOKS
KLMNO WEEKLY
Time for a trip to ‘South Pole Station’
Ill-fated journey of the Donner Party
F ICTION
N ONFICTION
I
l
REVIEWED BY
D ENNIS D RABELLE
n the late 20th century, American readers went “Polecrazy.” The fad may have been kicked off by Roland Huntford, whose “Scott and Amundsen” (1979) dragged a muckrake across the grave of revered British explorer Robert Falcon Scott. Hoping to be the first man at the South Pole, Scott got there in 1912 only to find a Norwegian flag flying, planted a month earlier by his better-prepared rival Roald Amundsen. Huntford followed up in 1985 with a splendid, adulatory biography of another Scott rival, the Irishman Ernest Shackleton; and it wasn’t long before the Far North and its explorers were rediscovered, too. It’s in this context that Cooper Gosling, the protagonist of Ashley Shelby’s enjoyable first novel, “South Pole Station,” applies for a fellowship to study in the Antarctic. Cooper belongs to a polar family — not polar by personal experience, but through books, notably Apsley Cherry-Garrard’s “The Worst Journey in the World” (1922) and her own father’s storytelling. She and her brother David, she lovingly recalls, “used to pretend we were members of the Scott party, back when we were kids.” By the time the adult Cooper, a professional artist, reaches the coldest continent under the auspices of a National Science Foundation arts program, David’s long battle with schizophrenia has ended in suicide. To his sister, then, the South Pole is more than just the stuff bucket lists are made of. Shelby has fun with the sort of people Antarctica attracts: misfits and eccentrics, who are stuck with one another for months at a time, almost entirely indoors and thousands of miles away from the nearest flowering of normal life. Among several vivid characters are an assistant chef who stoops to thievery in her campaign to become top cook; a black, gay representative of the NSF whose unflappability keeps most of his
charges in line; and a handsome astrophysicist named Sal, who, when not conducting experiments to understand how the universe originated, acts as Cooper’s love interest. There’s a special term for Antarctic liaisons of convenience: “ice marriages.” Cooper and Sal, however, seem to be aiming for a frost-free relationship. And then we have Dr. Frank Pavano, a global-warming denier whose presence brings out the worst in practically everyone at the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station. His polar peers are not content to let him fail on his own; they nudge the process along by sabotaging his work. Because Cooper has been nice to him, Pavano invites her to help him with an outdoor experiment. She agrees, and the collaboration ends badly for them both, not least by incurring the wrath of climate-change naysayers in Congress who control the NSF’s purse strings. Shelby does better with some of its themes than with others. Cooper’s attempts to come to terms with her brother’s death are surprisingly unmoving, for example, while Sal’s pursuit of a theory as to how the world came into being makes for gripping reading. But Shelby is very good on social interactions at the end of the earth, and “South Pole Station” crackles with energy whenever science takes center stage. She makes Sal’s abstruse theorizing both comprehensible and exciting, and excels at dramatizing the conflict between the “Beakers,” as the polar scientists are known, and the visiting congressional troglodytes. The novel might also give comfort to bucket-list worrywarts, who now have good reason to skip Antarctica. As Cooper notes on her first day there, “You think Antarctica is going to be the purest place in the world . . . and you get here and it’s like Akron.” n Drabelle is a former contributing editor of The Washington Post’s Book World.
S SOUTH POLE STATION By Ashley Shelby Picador. 368 pp. $26
THE BEST LAND UNDER HEAVEN The Donner Party in the Age of Manifest Destiny By Michael Wallis Liveright. 453 pp. $27.95
l
REVIEWED BY
T IMOTHY S MITH
arah Murphy Foster sat by a campfire in the early winter of 1847, grieving the death of her brother, Lem-
uel. “She looked up,” the historian Michael Wallis writes, “and noticed some of the emigrants on the other side of the fire roasting meat spitted on sticks. Suddenly, Sarah realized she was watching someone eat the broiled heart of her cherished younger brother.” Her husband guided the distraught woman away. Foster was a member of the Donner Party, a band of American pioneers who had set out for California in the spring of 1846. After a series of mishaps, the party became snowbound in the Sierra Nevada mountains. Lemuel Murphy died of starvation, one of 35 to perish that winter. Their story is told by Michael Wallis in “The Best Land Under Heaven,” an even-handed, briskly written history of the party, destined to become the standard account of this horrid chapter of American history. Much of the Donner Party’s journey was typical of the voyage west. The pioneers traded with Indians, visited fur-trading posts, hunted buffalo. There were births and marriages, deaths and burials. A cattle driver amputated a boy’s leg with “a common butcher-knife, a carpenter’s handsaw, and a shoemaker’s awl to take up the arteries.” The operation lasted 105 minutes, and the boy died. Wagon accidents, Wallis reports, were the most frequent cause of injury and death on the pioneer trails. That was hardly the worst of it for the Donner Party. The group, much delayed by a tendency to dawdle, made a crucial error when it diverged from the well-established California Trail above the Great Salt Lake for a shortcut through the desert salt flats below the lake. That route was offered by Lansford Hastings in an 1845 guidebook
for Oregon and California pioneers. It proved to be the party’s undoing. “The toll of the desert crossing was the loss of three dozen animals, four wagons, many of the emigrants’ belongings and, most important, eleven precious days,” Wallis writes. The party entered the Sierra Nevada in late fall, the worst timing possible. Hastings explained why: “Unless you pass over the mountains early in the fall,” he wrote, “you are very liable to be detained, by impassable mountains of snow, until the next spring, or, perhaps, forever.” The group was walloped by snow, one of 10 monstrous, unforgiving storms to pound the Sierras that winter. Stranded in the mountains, the party subsisted on field mice and twigs and a broth of boiled cattle and bison hides. The meager supplies did little to stave hunger. “They grew weaker and frequently felt dizzy as their fat reserves and muscles were depleted,” Wallis writes. “The simplest tasks became difficult. Diminished circulation caused feet, ankles, and hands to swell. With continued weight loss, the emigrants experienced painful constipation followed by uncontrollable diarrhea. Their immune systems broke down, which made them susceptible to various infections.” Some members of the party resorted to cannibalism. It took four relief parties until the spring of 1847 to rescue the 46 survivors. The Donner Party’s fate, Wallis writes, “resulted from poor decisions, inadequate preparation, quirks of fate, squadered opportunities, and failure to learn from mistakes.” One survivor later offered a hard-earned lesson: “Remember, never take no cutoffs and hurry along as fast as you can.” n Smith is a former staff member of Book World.
SUNDAY, JULY 23, 2017
20
KLMNO WEEKLY
OPINIONS
What McCain learned from Edward Kennedy PAUL KANE is The Post’s senior congressional correspondent and columnist. His column about the 115th Congress, @PKCapitol, appears throughout the week and on Sundays.
Ted Kennedy liked to tell a favorite story about Sen. John McCain. The Massachusetts Democrat and the Arizona Republican were on the floor of the Senate and became distracted by a heated debate between two freshmen senators. Just for the fun of it, Kennedy and McCain launched into the fray. As one spoke, the other circled the chamber, pretending to be agitated. They bellowed away at each other. Finally, they scared the freshman senators off the floor. At that, Kennedy and McCain went back to doing what they did best, mastering the Senate and crafting a bipartisan deal that would overwhelm the opposition. “Ted and I shared the sentiment that a fight not joined was a fight not enjoyed,” McCain said during a speech seven years ago inside Boston’s John F. Kennedy Presidential Library. He was delivering a eulogy at the funeral of “my friend Ted,” days after Sen. Edward M. Kennedy had succumbed to a form of brain cancer known as glioblastoma. Sometimes fierce opponents, sometimes mischief-making partners, Kennedy and McCain helped define what the modern Senate could be, or at least should be. Now, their shared bond has taken a brutal turn: McCain has been diagnosed with the same brain cancer that cut Kennedy’s life short at 77. The Arizonan’s office announced that he is considering several medical options, including chemotherapy and radiation — a path that Kennedy chose during his 15month bout with the disease. It is unclear when McCain will return to the chamber, but his friends have reported that he expects to stay involved while fighting the cancer. Last week, McCain issued a statement
criticizing President Trump’s decision to end assistance to Syrian rebels battling the government of Bashar al-Assad. “The administration is playing right into the hands of Vladimir Putin,” McCain said. After a 2008 seizure led to his brain cancer diagnosis, Kennedy made very few appearances in the Senate, trying to help monitor the debate over the Affordable Care Act from his home on Cape Cod. If McCain’s appearances are as few and far between as Kennedy’s were, it will leave a gaping hole in the Senate’s fabric. Learning from more senior colleagues such as Kennedy, McCain has become a force unto himself in Congress. There is no other senator in the rank and file who wields that much clout. The last to do so was Kennedy. In the minority or majority, McCain uses his identity to shape the issues, and over the past year, nowhere has that fiercely independent status been more prevalent than in challenging Trump. Through his perch as chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, McCain has become Trump’s most highprofile critic of his attempt to steer a new course toward relations with Russia. In his tributes to Kennedy over the years, McCain credited his more senior colleague with teaching him how to be a great senator. “I admired his passion for his convictions, his patience with the
JACQUELYN MARTIN/ASSOCIATED PRESS
hard and sometimes dull work of legislating, and his uncanny sense for when differences could be bridged,” McCain told the Boston crowd in 2009. Theirs was an unlikely pairing. Kennedy was a playboy in his early years, while McCain served in the Navy and was held captive in Vietnam for 5½ years after his fighter jet was shot down. But they both came from dynasties in which they played the role of the underperforming ne’er-do-well. Kennedy’s older brothers included war heroes, a president and an attorney general, while young Ted needed family strings just to win a Senate seat. McCain’s grandfather and father were Navy legends, four-star admirals who helped command the Pacific fleet during World War II and the Vietnam War. John S. McCain III was the class clown at the Naval Academy. Together, Kennedy and McCain found common cause in the Senate, and there, in many ways, they forged bigger legacies than anyone in their respective families. Combined, their service adds up to 87 years, and counting, in the chamber. Neither could resist the presidential temptation — Kennedy in 1980, running in the Democratic primary against Jimmy Carter; McCain, falling short in 2000 to George W. Bush, then winning the 2008 GOP nomination only to lose decisively to Barack Obama.
The Kennedy-McCain bond first blossomed during arcane policy hearings of the sea power subcommittee, where they realized their shared interests often outweighed their ideological distance. They both use a wicked sense of humor that left everyone at ease once the laughter ended. Kennedy challenged presidents of both parties, and he did not hesitate to challenge his own leader. McCain’s clashes with his party leaders perhaps hit a crescendo in December, when he personally delivered to Comey an unverified dossier about Trump’s ties to Russia. In March 2015, McCain again trekked to Boston, for the EMK Institute grand opening, next to the JFK Library. He later confessed that he borrowed a topcoat from one of Obama’s Secret Service agents to endure the cold before taking the stage to pay tribute to Kennedy’s Senate career in the same way — we all hope it will be some day far in the future — McCain’s colleagues will remember him. “I miss my friend. I miss him a lot,” McCain told the crowd, just after he finished telling the story about the time they scared those freshman senators. “I knew I would when I said six years ago that the Senate wouldn’t be the same without him. And it hasn’t been. I have no doubt that the place would be a little more productive and a lot more fun if he were there.” n
SUNDAY, JULY 23, 2017
21
OPINIONS
KLMNO WEEKLY
TOM TOLES
I cannot defend the GOP anymore JOE SCARBOROUGH a former Republican congressman from Florida, hosts the MSNBC show “Morning Joe.”This was written for The Washington Post.
I did not leave the Republican Party. The Republican Party left its senses. The political movement that once stood athwart history resisting bloated government and military adventurism has been reduced to an amalgam of talk-radio resentments. President Trump’s Republicans have devolved into a party without a cause, dominated by a leader hopelessly ill-informed about the basics of conservatism, U.S. history and the Constitution. America’s first Republican president reportedly said: “Nearly all men can stand adversity. But if you want to test a man’s character, give him power.” The current Republican president and the party he controls were granted monopoly power over Washington in November and already find themselves spectacularly failing Abraham Lincoln’s character exam. It would take far more than a single column to detail Trump’s failures in the months following his bleak inaugural address. But the Republican leaders who have subjugated themselves to the White House’s corrupting influence fell short of Lincoln’s standard long before their favorite reality-TV star brought his gaudy circus act to Washington. When I left Congress in 2001, I praised my party’s successful
efforts to balance the budget for the first time in a generation and keep many of the promises that led to our takeover in 1994. I concluded my last speech on the House floor by foolishly predicting that Republicans would balance budgets and champion a restrained foreign policy for as long as they held power. I would be proved wrong immediately. As the new century began, Republicans gained control of the federal government. George W. Bush and the GOP Congress responded by turning a $155 billion surplus into a $1 trillion deficit and doubling the national debt, passing a $7 trillion unfunded entitlement program and promoting a foreign policy so utopian it would have made Woodrow Wilson blush. After their well-deserved drubbing, Republicans swore that
if voters ever entrusted them with running Washington again, they would prove themselves worthy. Trump’s party was given a second chance this year, but it has spent almost every day since then making the majority of Americans regret it. The GOP president questioned America’s constitutional system of checks and balances. Republican leaders said nothing. He echoed Stalin and Mao by calling the free press “the enemy of the people.” Republican leaders were silent. And as the commander in chief insulted allies while embracing autocratic thugs, Republicans who spent a decade supporting wars of choice remained quiet. Meanwhile, their budget-busting proposals demonstrate a fiscal recklessness very much in line with the Bush years. Recent Russia revelations show just how shamelessly Republican lawmakers will stand by a longtime Democrat who switched parties after the promotion of a racist theory about Barack Obama gave him standing in Lincoln’s once-proud party. It is a dying party that I can no longer defend. Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Jon Meacham has long predicted that the Republican and Democrats’ 150-year duopoly
will end. The signs seem obvious enough. When my Republican Party took control of Congress in 1994, it was the first time the GOP had won the House in a generation. The two parties have been in a state of turmoil ever since. In 2004, Republican strategist Karl Rove anticipated a majority that would last a generation; two years later, Pelosi became the most liberal House speaker in history. Obama was swept into power by a supposedly unassailable Democratic coalition. In 2010, the tea party tide rolled in. Obama’s reelection returned the momentum to the Democrats, but Republicans won a historic state-level landslide in 2014. Then last fall, Trump demolished both the Republican and Democratic establishments. Political historians will one day view Donald Trump as a historical anomaly. But the wreckage visited of this man will break the Republican Party into pieces — and lead to the election of independent thinkers no longer tethered to the tired dogmas of the polarized past. When that day mercifully arrives, the two-party duopoly that has strangled American politics for almost two centuries will finally come to an end. And Washington just may begin to work again. n
SUNDAY, JULY 23, 2017
22
KLMNO WEEKLY
OPINIONS
BY DANZIGER FOR THE RUTLAND HERALD
Democrats finally have an agenda DANA MILBANK writes about political theater in the nation’s capital. He joined The Washington Post as a political reporter in 2000.
“The Democrats,” Vice President Pence said recently, “have already settled on their agenda, and it can be summed up in one word: resist.” He isn’t the only one with that view of Democrats. In the latest Washington Post-ABC News poll, only 37 percent of Americans think the Democratic Party “stands for something,” while 52 percent say it “just stands against Trump.” The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, the House Democrats’ campaign arm, seemed to admit as much two weeks ago when it sent supporters an email with the proposed slogan: “Democrats 2018: Have you seen the other guys?” Now Democrats are trying to fix that — and not a moment too soon. On Monday, I am told, congressional Democrats — in the Senate and the House together — will roll out a legislative policy agenda, their de facto 2018 campaign platform. The details, after months of haggling and catherding, could yet disappoint, but the broad outlines as described to me are exactly what the doctor ordered. As important as what’s in it is what’s not. Democrats jettisoned social and foreign policy issues for this exercise, eschewing the
identity politics and box-checking that has plagued Democratic campaigns in the past, most recently Hillary Clinton’s. This will be purely an economic message. They also resisted invitations to steer the party toward the center (as pollster Mark Penn advised) or in a more progressive agenda. This is meant to be a populist manifesto that doesn’t conform to the left/right debate but instead aims to align Democrats with ordinary, middleclass Americans fighting powerful special interests. Titled “A Better Deal: Better Skills, Better Jobs, Better Wages,” it is expected to have many Democratic staples — tax increases on the rich, affordable college, infrastructure spending, higher wages, job training, paid family leave and the like — and a few new ones. Hashed out over several
BY ROGERS FOR THE PITTSBURGH POST-GAZETTE
months by Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (N.Y.) and Sen. Chris Van Hollen (Md.), with House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (Calif.), DCCC Chairman Ben Ray Luján (N.M.), and Reps. Hakeem Jeffries (N.Y.), Cheri Bustos (Ill.) and David Cicilline (R.I.), it will be outlined Monday with a few sample proposals, to be followed in the coming weeks by more proposals. The goal is to avoid repeating Clinton’s problem in 2016. She scratched the itches of so many Democratic constituencies that she lacked a coherent economic message. The full-throated populist agenda should also make it harder for President Trump to claim that he is the one fighting special interests, which he did to great effect against Clinton. Democrats have been little but the anti-Trump party lately, successfully fighting his legislative agenda, particularly health care, and raising a ruckus about the Russia scandal and Trump’s other outrages. The danger is that an impression solidifies among voters that the party has nothing else to say. As if to illustrate the point, 23 liberal House Democrats announced last week that they were filing a “resolution of no confidence” in Trump. A reporter asked Rep. Steve Cohen (Tenn.),
sponsor of the no-confidence resolution, if he was focusing too much on Trump over jobs. “Bubble-gum chew and walk at the same time,” he recommended. Except Democrats haven’t been doing both. Some think they don’t have to, because polls show that voters prefer a Democratic Congress. But as The Post’s Mike DeBonis and Emily Guskin point out, more Republicans and Republican-leaning independents (65 percent) say they will definitely vote next year than Democrats and Democraticleaning independents (57 percent). To boost Democratic turnout, the party needs to be more than just anti-Trump. Even if it doesn’t help their electoral prospects, Democrats need a clear agenda so they can govern if they do win. If they win without a sharp agenda, they would end up where congressional Republicans are now: in power but without a popular mandate for their agenda. Last Wednesday, I asked Rep. Linda Sánchez (Calif.) about the search for a unified agenda, and she bristled. “We’re not searching for an agenda,” she replied. “Democrats have always known what we stood for.” They just did a really good job of keeping it under wraps. n
SUNDAY, JULY 23, 2017
23
KLMNO WEEKLY
FIVE MYTHS
Florida BY
A DAM W EINSTEIN
Ordinarily at this point in the slow, hot summer, American journalists would be out of stories and looking to Florida — my allegedly strange longtime home — for “weird news” inspiration. We don’t have that problem this year, because America elected a parttime Florida Man as president. But Floridians still have to deal with an unearned reputation as a nexus of the bizarre and the tragic. “Sometimes I think I’ve figured out some order in the universe,” Susan Orlean famously wrote, “but then I find myself in Florida, swamped by incongruity and paradox, and I have to start all over again.” Here are five common myths about America’s sunsoaked southerly proboscis. MYTH NO. 1 Florida is a cultural wasteland. Sure, it’s the land of Disney World and Universal Studios and stucco and strip malls. It has that weird double existence that characterizes a lot of frontier or colonial destinations: It has been stereotyped as the exotic “other,” then it capitalized on the stereotype’s allure to drive the local economy, then it lost track of what was real and what was just a reductive stereotype. Now, it all blends together. As they said in an old tourism ad from the “Miami Vice” days, “The rules are different here.” But Florida’s proud, contrived role as a lazy, breezy, escapist state of nature yields something nobody could have predicted: lots of cultural heroes, large and small. Consider these icons: Southern-rock legends Lynyrd Skynyrd, Doors frontman Jim Morrison, Flo Rida, Johnny Depp, Tom Petty, Norman Reedus, Zora Neale Hurston, Tao Lin and Kate DiCamillo. Don’t say Florida never did anything for you. MYTH NO. 2 Florida is separate from the Deep South. If you’ve ever traveled down the Panhandle’s Redneck Riviera to eat oysters in Apalachicola or made a pilgrimage to watch
college football in Doak and the Swamp, you know there’s a lot of twang to go with the Tang. There really is a place called the FloraBama, situated exactly where you’d expect, and it really does host an annual mullet toss (the fish, not the hairdo, but you always see some of both). The cliche about the differences between northern Florida (red-state rednecks) and South Florida (pasty invaders and “Latins”) aren’t right, either. Even South Florida’s deep-blue urbanites can see social and cultural remnants of the South — for instance, the state park that used to be a blacks-only beach, and neighborhood divisions that persist years after Jim Crow. MYTH NO. 3 Florida is ready for the next big hurricane. Named storms are a seasonal fixture, but until Hurricane Matthew gave the state a serious scare last year, Floridians hadn’t had a real blow since 2004 and 2005, when they got blitzed by six hurricanes. Since then, the state’s population has grown by 15 percent — meaning at least 2.5 million new residents have probably never lived through a storm of significant size, much less a Wilma or an Andrew. And complacency abounds, even among old-timers. Gov. Rick Scott’s
JABIN BOTSFORD/THE WASHINGTON POST
administration is light on real storm experience, too. Scott appointed an out-of-state Walmart executive as his emergency preparedness director in 2011 amid a push to privatize some of the state’s disaster response programs. Scott’s administration is also accused of barring stateemployed scientists from discussing climate change or sealevel rise. MYTH NO. 4 Floridians are impossibly divided along political lines. It has been conventional wisdom since the 2000 recount that Florida is hopelessly split along political lines. But both sides are united by a love of the market. Indeed, the pro-business tendency is no less powerful among liberals, from South Florida — where many a real estate developer, D or R, has had a historically easy path to a mayorship — to Tallahassee, where even deep-blue Democratic gubernatorial hopefuls are known to boast about the size of their business tax repeals. One party wants probusiness decisions made by bureaucrats, and the other party wants pro-business decisions made by transnational
consortiums owned by shell corporations. MYTH NO. 5 The Florida housing market has learned its lesson. From 2003 to 2007, it was a hell of a time to be a Floridian: It seemed like everyone was a mortgage originator or a houseflipper. Obviously, that all ended, and a lot of people lost their butts on a “correction” in property values. Problem solved: Many Floridians don’t even have enough money to place another bad bet. But once again, the Florida real estate market is doing great. There’s a boom in sales and prices, and buyers have a lot of options — if they have half a million bucks or more to spend. In South Florida, even modest, fixer-upper apartments in sad neighborhoods are getting plucked up by cash buyers looking for rental income. Bigmoney and foreign investors are bidding up prices, perhaps precipitously so, on luxury and high-rise properties. n Weinstein, a senior editor at Task & Purpose and a Florida native, is working on a memoir about gun culture in America. This was written for The Washington Post.
SUNDAY, JULY 23, 2017
24
GREAT WINE. GREAT FOOD. GREAT FUN.
It’s the largest gathering of wineries in the region, and the only professionally-judged wine event dedicated to wines produced in Chelan, Douglas, Grant and Okanogan counties. And this year it’s bigger than ever—more food, wine, beers, ciders, distilleries and eateries.
Saturday, August 26, 2017
6pm to 9pm
Town Toyota Center, Wenatchee
Tickets $45 each • A limited number of VIP tickets available for $75 each Available online at wenatcheewineandfood.com or at the door Presented by Foothills Magazine
oothills
Interested in having a booth at this event? E-mail us at info@wenatcheewineandfood.com
WENATCHEE ❆ LEAVENWORTH ❆ CHELAN AND ALL OF NORTH CENTRAL WASHINGTON
Sponsored by
Port of Chelan County • Banner Bank • Spokane Industries • Port of Douglas County • Moss-Adams, LLP • Great Northwest Wine Visconti’s Italian Restaurant • Blue Horizon Insurance & Financial Services • Haglund’s Trophies • Wenatchee Valley Museum & Cultural Center Wenatchee Valley Chamber of Commerce • Real Homes - RE/MAX - Viva Wenatchee • Microsoft Data Center Operations • Washington Trust Bank